GENERAL INFORMATION
Established:  1997
Type:  Industry
Ownership:  Private

Core business

Raw Material Optimization Products.

Employees:  45
Professionals:  35
Market regions:  US, Japan, Europe
Main Markets:  Metal fabrication, Furniture, Polyurethane, Textile, Polyethylene, Automotive

Overview

PLATAINE (formerly Nester Software Technologies) is a leading
provider of production optimization solutions for manufacturers
of metal, wood, textile and composite-material products.
PLATAINE's solutions help manufacturers optimize production
processes that involve two-dimensional cutting of raw material -
such as engineered wood, sheet metal, and textile - and the
assembly of the cut pieces into a finished product.. PLATAINE's
solutions are used by over 1,000 customers in the apparel,
furniture, transportation, and other industries.

The goal of the company is to offer a general computerized
solution to the marker-making (a.k.a. nesting) problem - the
problem of finding an efficient layout for two-dimensional pieces
of various shapes to be cut out of raw material, in order to
minimize waste.

Within the global tendency to computerize and automate
manufacturing, the field of marker making remained one of the
last places where human intellect and experience beat the
machine. The problem of marker making (or nesting) is categorized
as a NP-complete hard combinatorial problem for which no
analytical solution is known. The only possible way to find a
solution of the acceptable quality to such a problem is by using
of AI tools and methods.

PLATAINE's ability to optimize production is driven by its
technology, developed over years of intensive research devoted to
the optimization of time, cost, and material utilization, and
proven through hundreds of successful implementations.

The results are clear and measurable. PLATAINE's solutions
empower manufacturers to increase material utilization, improve
machine productivity, reduce inventories, shorten product
delivery time, and lower the cost of production.

The company has developed the PLATAINE Expert System that copes
with the marker making problem, utilizing unique knowledge in
mathematics, computational geometry and AI. This system is
successfully sold throughout the world during the last three
years, and is generally accepted by the industry as "best in
class" and benchmark for competing products as well as human
marker making experts.

Available R&D facilities
R&D employees:  20
R&D professionals:          20